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Last night I went to Lights For The Wild at Taronga Zoo. As usual, I took a lot of photos with my DSLR camera, over 200, though a lot of that number are quite similar as I often take two or three to increase the chances of getting the right shot, sometimes I vary the speed so that one is better exposed.

The camera saves both a RAW file​ and a JPEG so I end up with over 400 images. Looking through them in QuickLook in the Finder can be painful as the RAW images take quite a while to load, then you get the problem that when you have decided which of the three shots you want to keep you also have to delete the matching JPEG or RAW file.

The easiest solution to both of these is to only go through the JPEG files and then delete the matching NEF file (which is what the Mac calls the RAW file).

So I open the folder and sort by ‘Kind’ which puts the JPEGs at the top. I then open the first in QuickLook by hitting space and using the up and down arrow keys to move through the list command–delete deletes a file and displays the next. Easy.

Now I have 80 JPEG files from the original 240. How to get rid of the NEF files that match the JPEG files I have deleted? A little bash programming to the rescue.

for i in *.NEF ; do
if [ ! -e `basename $i NEF`JPG ]; then
rm $i;
fi
done

The secret to this is the basename utility. It’s a neat little tool. Pass it a full file path such as /Users/tonyw/Documents/UselessRamblings.txt and it will return just
the file name without the path, UselessRamblings.txt. It has a matching tool, dirname which returns just the path portion. As you can see from my code basename has another trick, it will happily strip the suffix from the filename if you tell it what to strip.